Monorail A Solution To State College Transportation Woes

Dear Editor:

It’s very important when pursuing a degree of higher education to take classes pertaining and relevant to society and the world today because this is the world we live in. Currently, my geography class is working on a group project that applies to the transportation sustainability of the borough of State College.

After shuffling around a few ideas, we decided on one that may not be affordable or possible at this time of economic slump, but would apply to the issues at hand: students living off campus that have a hard time finding fast and efficient ways to campus; and providing a mode of transportation in which it is faster, can hold more people and is more economically friendly than the current buses and cars that people use to get from one place to another.

This idea was an elevated, magnet-powered, levitated monorail train that would run to the outer limits of the borough and effectively and efficiently carry people to the places they needed to be quickly. The idea was genius, I might add. It answers all the questions and avoids problems down the road. It’s environmentally friendly because it runs off of opposing magnets. It can carry hundreds of people, more than any bus. It’s almost entirely self-sufficient. It runs above traffic, so it reduces traffic congestion caused by buses. It would be fairly expensive to build. But once it’s operational and functioning, the monorail needs hardly any maintenance and runs on basically pennies. So, although it will take a lot of tax money and donations to build, once its paid for, tax money will not be paying for the monorail indefinitely.

We already have Beaver Stadium, Old Main, the HUB-Robeson Center, and so many others, why not add yet another to that with the monorail, call it the “Lion Rail.” Justin Gordon Freshmen, Landscape Architecture, Penn State

The letter writer is from Mc-Connellsburg and is a freshmanat Penn State University wherehe is working on a geographyproject of which this letter is apart.